All the biggies: feminism, motherhood, environment, food

A review of Elisabeth Badinter's Conflict: The Woman and the Mother on the NYTimes caught my eye because it reminded me of a post on the Racialious blog I read a few weeks ago. Both say that certain modern trends imply that women should return to their traditional domestic roles.

Badinter is a French academic. I hadn't heard of her before but it seems she has a significant body of work criticizing (evaluating?) feminism. She previously wrote that feminists are undermining themselves by popularizing the notion of women as victims.

But I want to focus on a point in her latest book, which takes up the issue of motherhood in modern times. She writes that the green and natural movement erodes the gains of feminism. It pressures women abandon modern inventions that have eased childrearing for old, labor-intensive ways.

From the New York Times:

But Ms. Badinter thinks that new social pressures are hard for many women to resist. The “green” mother, she says, is pushed to give birth at home, to refuse an epidural as the reflection of “a degenerated industrial civilization” that would deprive her of “an irreplaceable experience,” to breast-feed for both ethological and environmental reasons (plastic baby bottles) and to use washable rather than disposable diapers — in other words, to discard the inventions “that have liberated women.”

 This reminded me of criticism leveled by feminists against advocates of the food reform and sustainable agriculture movement. Michael Pollan, the figurehead of the food reform movement, is criticized for being alienating working women and women of color.

This comes from Racialicious:

First, Pollan and others situate the current state of American consumption in a patriarchal paradigm. These writers speak about a disappearance of food culture that for the most part accompanies male privilege. For example, Pollan, in an article for the New York Times on cooking and entertainment aptly titled “Out of the Kitchens, Onto the Couch,” explores the relationship between second-wave feminism and the gender politics of cooking. He argues that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique convinced women to regard their housework, specifically cooking, as drudgery. Friedan did not, in fact, construct this sentiment herself; she merely observed the existent trends in white women’s attitudes about food and housewifery. Pollan goes on to describe how Julia Child inspired his mother and other women like her, empowering them to channel their creativity into the kitchen. This is apt praise for the lively and engaging cook, but can Pollan not drive home the point that Americans need to cook more often without guilting American feminists?

Feminists and progressive people like to talk about the overlaps among their passions. And I agree too that there are many, not just the issues, but the people in one camp have overlapping interests. There are, I think, obvious intersections among feminism, environmental movement, organized labor, ethnic movements, and other social justice movements. I think my readers are well-informed about these intersections.

Both these critiques really resonate with me, not because I'm denouncing the benefits of reusable diapers or fruit and vegetables, but because they show an ugly reality. People who call themselves feminists or progressives or generally working to help people don't always agree. There are dividing lines.

It made me happy to see vocal feminists of color voiced their criticism of other progressive movements. I think sometimes there's an implicit assumption that feminists are uncritical of activists in other progressive areas. But this isn't entirely true. I care about the environment and about eating better, but not as much as I care about some other feminists issues. That's why I was the co-chair of Women's Council. Though I worked extensively with other progressive and racial ethnic groups on campus, I had one focus where I directed most of my attention.

You could argue that Michael Pollan doesn't want only women to return to the kitchen but both men AND women to cook but the truth is also that women are still the one who do most of the housework. So when you say, "go make (a nutritious) dinner (of locally grown, organic produce that will bring together your whole family)", it's women that are heading back into the kitchen.

In the end, I think both Badinter and Michael Pollan and the food reform movement hit on the same point: women are judge by society, by other women, by themselves on how they raise their children, be it the food they eat or the diapers  wear.

Things I Think About: Big Talk, edited

An extended version of what was posted a few hours ago. 

One of the most read articles on NYTimes.com the past few days has been this one on the correlation between happiness and substantive conversations. This study found that people for whom substantive conversations -- rather than small talk -- made up a greater proportion of their total conversations rate themselves happier.

The author of the study on the reasons for this:

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people. 

From Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

In the comments follow this article, one reader tried to draw a connection between social media and the substance of conversations, noting that this is perhaps why interactions on Twitter and Facebook don't make people happier. 

Of course it's just a causation but it is interesting to see evidence backing up what I have felt in my interactions with people.

Reading this, naturally I reviewed the substantive conversations I have had in Denmark. So there it was. The cause of the general dis-ease I have felt the past weeks coincides with the lack of conversations I've had the last couple weeks. It's not because the initial excitement of being in a new place has mellowed that I've been feeling drab. During the first few weeks I certainly met new people and made small talk with them but I also managed some really insightful conversations. Somehow this dried up in recent weeks while the stream of parties, dinner parties, and sightseeing trips Århus continued.

Don't get me wrong, I have many friends in Århus, friends whose hospitality I have and will depend on in the future, friends who invite me to their dorms for dinner, friends with whom I've drunk vodka, which apparently makes us good friends, so some Polish guys have been trying to tell me... but I've miss some element of the weeks before.

I want to know more than how to say cheers in their language.

A cause for celebration

Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah. I was going to write about the story of Hanukkah I first read in Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht, a historical survey of doubt, emphasizing skepticsm was healthy in the past and made significant contributions. But David Brooks beat me to it, as he and Hecht tell the story of Hanukkah as a conflict between less religious Jews and more religious Jews. The Greeks gentiles weren't the central players.

The story of Hanukkah that I know, the most basic, most sanitized version, goes like this:

The Jews resisted their forced conversion to Greek paganism from the Greek rulers. They forced Jews to worship Greek gods and even dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem to Zeus. However, Judah Maccabbee organized a resistance against the Greeks and won. They got religious freedom, preserved their nation, and the Temple was rededicated. But the oil remaining in the Temple was only enough to last one night, but miraculously, it burned for eight nights. The Jews were happy. And Hanukkah is celebrated for eight nights.

But Hecht and Brooks have this account of Hanukkah. The chief conflict was between Hellenized Jews and more orthodox Maccabbees. It's a question of identity and of religious practice. Who can be a Jew? Assimilated Jews and conservative Jews had different answers.

Furthermore, Jews forced to assimilate into Greek society. They did so willingly. Hecht writes:

For Jews, this meant an economic, social and cultural boom. Jews took on Greek names — Joshua became Jason, Saul became Paul. And they built a gymnasium — a Greek center for training in sports, philosophy and politics — at the foot of the Temple Mount.

Hellenized Jews weren't keeping kosher.

Many Greek-educated Jews of the upper class (often the elite priest class) ignored the laws of Moses, which seemed restrictive and dated. Abraham became their great father because, predating Moses, he did not keep kosher.

However, the pious (and poorer Jews) angry. This erupted when one Jew killed another who went to the temple to sacrifice, to Zeus. Hecht continues:

The killer’s son Judah would come to be called Maccabee (the hammer) for his ruthless soldiering. Wherever the Maccabees triumphed, secular Jewish men were brutalized, even beheaded.

The rededication of the Temple then, came about because one group of Jews triumphed over their more secular brethren.

I'm not here to rain on the menorah lighting, gift exchanging, and dreidel spinning festivities. The history of Hanukkah doesn't diminish what I think is the significance of holidays anyway: to be together with the family, to feel a sense of goodwill among people (or among people of the same religion...). Even if the reason for celebration is invented, it's still a good time.

It is not my intention to channel Brook's subtext. I'll not speculate on modern parallels to "angry, bearded religious guys to win an insurgency campaign against a great power in the Middle East" as he writes in his column. Disclaimers done, now my point.

My point is this, to quote Brooks, "The lesson of Hanukkah is that even the struggles that saved a people are dappled with tragic irony, complexity and unattractive choices." The narratives that define a people are less joyous and more ambivalent than we generally think they are.

My point is also, to echo Hecht, "Hanukkah will be a celebration of Hellenized Jewry. These ancestors weren’t turncoats, after all — they were good cosmopolitan Jews." We are living in even more cosmopolitan times than second century BCE Judea. The flow of cultures should not be an alarm to ward off the border from ideas and from people. Our definition of what constitutes a people should be narrow. Our only option is to accept greater diversity, not only in religious belief, but in all other matters.

Private Lives

I think my blog would be more interesting to read if my commentary were more timely. I usually read or do something that inspires me to write a blog, but then I push it back a week or so or more before I write about it. So I did read Married (Happily) With Issues when it debuted on the cover of the NYTimes Sunday Magazine but I'm writing about it now.

Pursue sapience read this too. (As did a lot of other people. It was the most viewed piece on NYTimes.com for a couple days.) It was eye-opening since people usually don't speak frankly about their personal lives, but I also know the window into their private lives is an illusion, the way that celebrities don't really reveal who they are. I'm not sure how I feel about articles dissecting the author's personal lives anyway. It's interesting, voyeuristic on one hand, but it's too (fake) confessional. Not all secrets will be unearthed to the NYTimes.

About the article itself: It thumped the steady drumbeat of disillusionment that I now think is inevitable in middle life with moments like this:

The psychologist Michael Vincent Miller describes marriage as mocking our “fondest dreams,” because the institution is not the wellspring of love we imagine it to be. Instead it’s an environment of scarcity, it’s “a barbaric competition over whose needs get met”; it’s “two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one.” 

But the article was also punctuated by moments of  "WTF! I can't believe someone took this seriously enough to write about it in a book". 

Then one day at my desk I started reading “The Multi-Orgasmic Couple: Sexual Secrets Every Couple Should Know.” I sent Dan an e-mail message entitled “Nine Taoists Thrusts.”

Page 123, from the seventh-century physician Li T’ung-hsuan Tzu:
1. Strike left and right as a brave general breaking through the enemy ranks.
2. Rise and suddenly plunge like a wild horse bucking through a mountain stream.
3. Push and pull out like a flock of seagulls playing on the waves.
4. Use deep thrusts and shallow teasing strokes, like a sparrow plucking pieces of rice.
5. Make shallow and then deeper thrusts in steady succession.
6. Push in slowly as a snake entering its hole.
7. Charge quickly like a frightened mouse running into its hole.
8. Hover and then strike like an eagle catching an elusive hare.
9.Rise up and then plunge down low like a great sailboat in a wild wind.

This last point also falls into a category of “ancient non-white people are soooo mystical, soooo exotic, and had the secret to fantastic sex using ridiculous metaphors” that sets off a whole other theme I like to blog about. So now you know that behind the placid veneer of the wizened, beared Daoist, they were getting it on like rabbits. Or like sparrows plucking at pieces of rice.

Alternate readings

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss must be one of the most reproduced paintings in western art. I've seen it as posters, on the sides of ceramic mugs, and even as a necktie at some art museum gift shop. A print of it hangs in the office of Lori Brotto, a researcher of  female sexual desire, as profiled here.
Like most people who have glanced at a reproduction, I thought that it shows a man turning his head to kiss a woman.

But this article mentions two readings of the painting, "The couple in the painting, with the woman either bending sublimely in the man’s emphatic embrace or wincing away from his lips..."

Now that I look at the painting, I see how this interpretations fits the painting just as well as the conventional reading. The the angle of the woman's head suggests she is pulling away or turning her head. And woman doesn't exactly look happy.

You are the reason I exist.

Gail Collins, NYTimes columnist:

"I have never believed that everything happens for a reason. But I do feel very strongly that everything happens so that it can be turned into a column."

Or so it can be turned into a blog entry.

Choice Words: Teen Pregnancy on MTV

Teen Pregnancy on MTV
June 29th, 2009 by Chen

Last week I wrote about Young, Single and Pregnant, in which a 22 year old young woman was unexpectedly pregnant and shared her decision to have an abortion on a New York Times blog. This got me thinking about discussions of abortion on TV. MTV has a new show called 16 and Pregnant. It is a one-hour documentary following a teen through her pregnancy as she deals with her family, her friends, and the baby’s father. So far three episodes have aired and I am guilty of having watched two of them. (It’s summer… I got time to watch TV…)

On the one hand, I applaud MTV’s efforts to engage in discussions of sexual behavior in young people through a public information campaign called IYSL, It’s Your Sex Life. The campaign is a pretty good one. It’s in partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation, so I know it’s got reputable people behind it. The campaign encourages several things: talking to your partner about sex, getting tested for STDs, and how to protect yourself. Overall, it’s a lot of good information. If you’ve watched MTV, you may have seen the PSAs broadcast during commercial breaks. I’ve definitely seen them.

For a one hour TV documentary that had to compress footage from almost a year, “16 and Pregnant” is pretty good in that it shows many of the hardships of parenthood, if somewhat formulaic. Gossip runs rampant at school, the pregnant girls have to change their lifestyles to accommodate their babies, they have to talk to their baby’s fathers, they have to deal with their own parents.

Watch full episodes of 16 and Pregnant here. The trailer to 16 and Pregnant is here.

16 and Pregnant is used as a part of the It’s Your Sex Life campaign. IYSL.com has clips of the show and uses it as a starting point for discussions about teen pregnancy. Either MTV is massively promoting its own shows or trying to give teens good sex ed information, or some combination of both. The MTV website for the show has links to its IYSL campaign.

All this talk of teen pregnancy via a public information campaign and a new TV show leaves me feeling that we have left out a rather large part of teen pregnancy: teens who terminate their pregnancies or put their children up for adoption. After the trials and tribulations, each teen mom in the show ultimately comes away with optimism and a cute little baby. The show allows us to see these difficulties of motherhood and it also demystifies teen motherhood. I think it’s demystifying that makes it more acceptable. I don’t think that the difficulties of motherhood will necessarily dissuade young girls from becoming parents because people have a great capacity to overcome these difficulties and every mother regardless of her age has to get up in the middle of the night for the baby. It makes me wonder if “16 and Pregnant” has a “war movie effect”. Most war movies glorify war because they emphasize camaraderie, patriotism, sacrifice, and victory. In the same vein, does 16 and Pregnant glorify teen motherhood? And cute babies and loyal soldiers make great television.

The materials on pregnancy in It’s Your Sex Life campaign do talk about abortion and adoption, but MTV’s programming lacks any serious discussion of these options. In 16 and Pregnant, all the girls have decided to raise their babies because that’s the concept of the show. I wish MTV had explored want to explore the decision-making process. Or maybe even have a show that featured girls who had abortions and adoptions. Not that I think for a minute that this will happen, since abortion is a censored word on TV, and MTV isn’t doing anything to demystify adoption or abortion.

Choice Words: The Conclusion to Young, Single, and Pregnant

I'm re-posting some old entries I wrote on Choice Words, the blog of Choice USA, because I want to try to keep all my blog posts together in this personal blog. Many of my writings on Choice Words have already been posted here. These are the ones that were not previously posted here. Choice USA is an awesome organization dedicated to reproductive choice and its intersections, so these posts explore these themes.

Originally published June 17th, 2009 by Chen

Here is the conclusion to the NYTimes blog article Young, Single and Pregnant that I blogged about earlier this week.

The young woman has made her decision after careful consideration. She met with admissions staff of the graduate program she was accepted to, with representatives from an adoption agency, and -- perhaps the hardest conversation to have -- her parents. She writes:

Once I came to the decision to terminate the pregnancy, so much of the guilt and sadness I’d been feeling melted away. I felt happy for the first time since finding out and I feel like my family is supportive of my decision. I’m focusing on the child I’ll have in a few years from now with someone I feel safe with and supported by. The life of that child will be infinitely better than this one and, sometimes, I wonder if such a miserable, lonely woman could even have a healthy child. There’s more to being a good birth mother than avoiding alcohol and eating right and I just don’t know if I have it. I’m a responsible girl but maybe that means knowing when you’ve put too much on yourself and it won’t work out.

For the young woman, I think she made the right decision for her because she put a lot of thought and effort into looking at her options. Her careful consideration moved me because that is really what good decision-making is about. I think she’ll achieve all that she has envisioned for herself.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all that was said on the NYTimes about this article but I don’t have time to write about it now. I’m sneaking in this blog post while I’m at work! Need to go back to work before someone sees me slacking off!

I love Nick Kristof

I have a crush on Nick Kristof, the New York Times columnist, because he consistently highlights the importance of women and girls in bettering societies, domestically and abroad. In particular, he always makes a strong case linking the importance of women to the most pressing, most challenging issues of the day. And I’m publicly declaring my love for him today because he and his wife Sheryl WuDunn wrote the cover piece for this past weekend’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, a special edition on women, that perfectly explains his view of the relationship between women’s empowerment and development.

From The Women's Crusade:

In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.

“The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution,” writes Kristof and WuDunn. Aid to women is not a pity cause, a pet cause, or a charity case. But I think sometimes these problems are perceived as such. The developed world, as individuals and as nations, give money to social causes as “charity”. “They” are poor and “we” are going out of our way to do a good deed. In contrast, money for, say, investment in developing markets is business and both sides are business partners. There is occasional hubbub — charity concerts and the like — over social programs, but they are generally given lip service. The bulk of global development efforts are devoted to political and economic issues. But Kristof and WuDunn very eloquently show that aid to women benefits everyone. Women will lead their families, their communities, and their countries to prosperity.

Like Kristof, I have always believed that treating women right is a vital part of any country that wants to security, stability, and become a player in the global community. But I don’t think many of those in power in this country and elsewhere share this belief because the more I have learned about world politics, the more I have come to see the gulf separating “hard” issues like security, arms control, trade and “soft” issues like education, nutrition, child and maternal health, and social issues. At times it makes me mildly embarrassed even, to say that I care about women’s issues because I think it pigeon holes me as idealistic and naive. Like I want to “help people” but have no understanding of national governments and global institutions. So I’m all the more glad to see Nick Kristof using his position as a widely-read journalist to explain that women’s rights is a vital part of the solution to global problems.

There is “hard” evidence now that helping women does help the whole society. It often happens that men who control the family finances don’t spend it well. And when you have very little to spend, you must spend wisely.

One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor — especially by men.

When women have control of money, they spend less on entertainment — alcohol, tobacco — and more on the family — food, medical care. So giving women greater financial power also helps families prioritize their spending.

The economist Esther Duflo of M.I.T. found that when the men’s crops flourish, the household spends more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have a good crop, the households spend more money on food. “When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves,” Duflo says.

Terrorism is one today’s most pressing issue today and women’s empowerment is a key part of it. Kristof concedes that the precise mechanism of this is unclear, but societies in which women participate are less likely to breed terrorism.

Yet another reason to educate and empower women is that greater female involvement in society and the economy appears to undermine extremism and terrorism. It has long been known that a risk factor for turbulence and violence is the share of a country’s population made up of young people. Now it is emerging that male domination of society is also a risk factor; the reasons aren’t fully understood, but it may be that when women are marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a military camp or a high-school boys’ locker room.

The piece opens with a Chinese saying that women hold up half the sky. It is a saying that I like very much and am familiar with. For now it seems that women should not peek through the cracks of a world that men have built and run. But a few good people, Nick Kristof included, know that they should be leading the world.

What Makes a Family, Part Two

After my post a few days ago on my personal feelings on family and children, I found this article about motherhood and marriage on the population level: “Out-of-Wedlock Birthrates Are Soaring, U.S. Reports“. The data are interesting in that they reveals the changing composition of families but the measures feel a bit antiquated and leave me wanting a better survey of families.

First, the stats: The Center for Disease Control released analysis of data collected in 2007 shows that 40 percent of all births in 2007 were to women who were not married. (Original data is here.)

Furthermore, parsing out the data reveals interesting trends in pregnancies and family composition. Teen pregnancies do not make up the majority of

Before 1970, most unmarried mothers were teenagers. But in recent years the birthrate among unmarried women in their 20s and 30s has soared — rising 34 percent since 2002, for example, in women ages 30 to 34. In 2007, women in their 20s had 60 percent of all babies born out of wedlock, teenagers had 23 percent and women 30 and older had 17 percent.

Lots more stats on nonmarital births through the decades, by race, by mother’s age, and compared to other industrialized countries.

But these data are interesting in what they measure and what they leave out. It keeps track of “nonmarital births”, birth to a woman who has never been married, or is widowed or divorced. It’s a question asked when a birth is registered. But the terms “nonmarital birth”, “unwed mother” and children “born-out-of-wedlock” have gradually lost the same meanings they did when these studies were originally done. That is, it is becoming more mainstream and less … shameful that marriage is not a requirement for motherhood. I suppose being “born-out-of-wedlock” is one step up from being “illegitimate.”

My feelings on this were confirmed by a New York Times news commentary piece about these stats. I think one commentator sums it up very well:

The fact that 40 percent of American children are now born out of wedlock is yet another example of why policymakers and researchers need to discard one-size-fits-all generalizations about the causes, consequences, risks and benefits of different family forms. Average outcomes from married and single parenting hide huge variations.

There is great variation among mothers who are not married. It did used to be that teenagers made up the majority of nonmarital births, which means that we could have a whole host of assumptions about the kind of life the children of teenage moms would have: probably low-income, low-education, no father, etc. But unmarried moms are now in general older and their lives are far more complicated. They could be cohabiting, could have other children, etc.

I’m not exactly faulting the CDC for the results because they are, by themselves, interesting. Their data come from birth registrations, so it really shows that even our data collection is antiquated. It is less and less meaningful to only know whether or not a mother is married. It would be even more interesting to read about a comprehensive sociological study of the state of motherhood.

x-posted at Choice Words

MWWS

I want to share with you something I learned a little while ago from a friend of mine. I can't believe I didn't put this together until now, seeing as I think of myself as being conscious of race issues, but that just goes to show that we're all still becoming aware of the pervasiveness of racism.

A few days ago I brought up to a friend of mine a column I read in the New York Times. Nick Kristof wrote about trafficking and prostitution of teenage girls in the U.S. with an emphasis on race and poverty. Many of these missing girls end up as prostitutes in the control of pimps. He writes,

If a middle-class white girl goes missing, radio stations broadcast amber alerts, and cable TV fills the air with “missing beauty” updates. But 13-year-old black or Latina girls from poor neighborhoods vanish all the time, and the pimps are among the few people who show any interest.

It initially surprised me, the scope of this, but then I began to notice that this really was popping up everywhere.
A few days later, Bob Herbert wrote of a similar experience about the death black infant when he was working as a newspaper editor. He was at a meeting with editors at a newspaper who were discussing doing a story on this. He writes:

One of the stories being pitched was about a baby that had been killed on Long Island. The editor running the meeting was completely relaxed. He was sprawled in his chair and was holding a handful of papers. His legs were crossed.

“What color is that baby?” he asked.

A tremendous silence fell over the room. Everyone understood what he meant. If the baby was white, the chances were much better that the story was worth big play. It might be something to get excited about.

Little did I know, this is phenomenon had a name: Missing White Woman Syndrome. It even has its own wikipedia entry here. It is basically what Nick Kristof described, that a missing girl from a middle class family will get lots of press coverage and public support to try to find her. But a girl from a poor family, likely black or Latino, will not get as much media attention.

Prioritizing Aid - More Questions Than Answers

There are many worthwhile causes to champion, injustices to fight, both financially and through other actions. Should I donate to an organization that, say, helps fund the education of girls, clean water, or HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment? Should I fund a domestic or international cause? Should I lobby for environmental issues? Universal healthcare in the U.S.?

I feel that I am prioritizing one condition over the other by devoting my efforts to a cause. Of course we should contribute toward solving all the world's problems, but I recognize that our resources -- money, time, political will -- are limited, so we can only give publicity to some diseases and not others.

Now expand this on the scale of national governments, multilateral aid organizations. We all have to make choices about how much to fund for what. Each foreign aid budget, domestic health budget, and NGO has to prioritize what it will spend the most money on.

I often read about how easy and cheap it is to cure a certain disease but there's no effort to do so. No global funds, no rock star benefit concerts, no massive whatever-color-ribbon campaigns. There is no publicity, funding, and political for very urgent needs with simple solution. I've heard that with just a little more push we can eradicate the last few pockets of polio, or with some cheap drug we can save lots of people from something terrible.

The latest example of this is Nick Kristof's column about pneumonia published on Mother's Day (The Killer No One Suspects). According to Kristof, a course of antibiotics to treat pneumonia costs only 27 cents, but pneumonia registers on few people's consciousness as a widespread, emergent disease.

This leads me to ask why some diseases or conditions get more attention than others. Is there some general fascination with the new and incurable disease that plagues all of us? Is it only greed and fame of politicians, drug companies, and scientists that set funding priorities?

I checked categories to which this entry belongs, I'm selecting many of them. This is because that at some level, these health, gender, environmental, and social issues are interrelated, cycles of poverty, environmental degradation leading to health effects, tuberculosis exacerbating AIDS, etc. But most organizations have one or several focuses, some of which leave other behind. Inevitably, aid organizations or lobbies will be fighting for the same funding, the same piece of the pie so to speak. Expansion of one program may see cuts in another. Am I second guessing myself too much? Is this the activists' curse of caring too much?


x-posted at Choice Words

Clicky clicky!

There are two things I really love:
1. Reading news online. My first choice for news online is NYTimes.com. A close second is bbc.co.uk. It's for when I've gone to NYT so often that no new articles have come up on the homepage yet.

2. Data arranged in cool graphics.
I find it interesting to see the most popular stories on news website. It's like snooping on a large group of people.

So as you can imagine, I was really happy when I discovered BBC + data! It's not just the simple top 10 list of most viewed or most emailed articles. This is the break down of most popular news on the BBC by continent!

As of right now, the most popular article in every continent is "World Moves to Contain Flu Spread". But after that, the rankings are slightly different.

I would gladly use a free domestic violence prevention pen.

This article in the NYTimes today was very encouraging.

Taking a Page, and a Pen, From Makers of Medicine

Free pens — bearing the names of drugs like Viagra and Januvia rather than the letters NYC — litter doctors’ offices all across New York, part of an often-criticized strategy by drug company sales representatives known as detailers, who traditionally go from waiting room to waiting room giving gifts to entice doctors to prescribe their products.

Now in New York, there is a new kind of detailer: people like Ms. Franklin, who are part of a campaign by the city to use pharmaceutical industry marketing savvy to spread the word about healthy practices to doctors in neighborhoods where patients often have the least access to the latest news in health care.

I think it's a very creative and simple way to engage health care providers in their patients' well being. In particular, I liked that this article highlighted a domestic violence prevention campaign, which does not usually fall in the duty of health care providers. Yet doctors are in a special position to speak to their patients honestly and confidentially about not just their bodily functions but their family situations too. I hope this idea takes off. I would gladly use a free domestic violence prevention pen.

I have no illusions that physicians are limited in their ability to mediate domestic violence. I mean, we're not asking them to all quit their jobs and work at domestic violence shelters. I think that we should recognize that health care providers have within them opportunities to care for their patients in many ways, and we should make use of them. All they can do is ask their patients and coax them into seeking help. But even "just" talking about domestic violence can have a powerful effect to recognize that abuse happens and to offer help.

In that spirit, I want to plug MSU Safe Place. I'm proud that MSU has its own domestic violence shelter. It is the only university in the country with a shelter program. Its shelter, counseling, and support services are free, confidential, and for MSU students, faculty, staff, their families and children. Like the article emphasized, dating and domestic violence happens to young people, old people, married couples, and unmarried couples, so college students can just as much be abusive relationships.

(Pre)Medicine. Part I.

I've started to read Pauline Chen's columns in the NYTimes. There are two columns that I want to bring up together, Stories in the Service of Making a Better Doctor and The Misery of the Med Student. Both of them ask basically the same questions. What makes a good doctor? How do we train medical students to be good doctors? The consensus is that well-rounded individuals make good doctors. We want doctors who can related to their patients, who can talk to them well, who care about them as a person and not as a disease, etc.

But I'm not sure how to judge medical schools' efforts at making well-rounded doctors. Are they really successful? Or are they just making some insincere effort at making it seem like medical schools care about more than the science of human body function?

Chen writes positively about the addition of narrative medicine in medical school and residency curricula. These are classes in which students read fiction and non-fiction works to gain better insight into a patient's Her column has anecdotal evidence for it and she says that studies have shown that it is successful. But it is also true that most doctors don't love literature, the arts, or the social sciences as much as people with advanced degrees in those fields. Otherwise they wouldn't be doctors. I think narrative medicine classes valuable if they can be taught so that even med students who don't like literature can discuss it in a meaningful way that helps them as doctors. Otherwise, as one comment said, it's just a glorified book club.

Med schools now require a certain number of humanities credits so they can accept more well-rounded applicants. But how do you know who took humanities classes as a undergrad because they really liked them or because they needed it to apply to med school?

Or do you even think this distinction matters? It is really hard to study anything other than medicine when you're in medical school because there's so much medicine to learn. Everything else has to get put on the backburner. One comment talks about the difficulty in fitting in other interests in med school:
I am a medical student with a literature background from undergrad. I wholeheartedly agree with the purpose of these programs, but the reality is this: the things one must learn in the med school — anatomy, physiology, pathology, immunology, microbiology, etc. — are simply too time-consuming to allow more than a cursory study of literature in some kind of throwaway class. Those students who are interested in it will explore further, but the vast majority won’t find it useless and will just resent it.

Dr. Chen had a similar experience in medical school. There was just so much to learn that these other efforts didn't diminish the amount of sheer information they had to learn. She writes:
Some of my professors tried to 'humanize' the process. They invited us to dinner in their homes, supported our extracurricular efforts to set up health screening clinics in low-income neighborhoods, and tried to make our basic science courses more relevant to working with patients. But sitting where I am now, as someone who teaches medical students and who loves helping others as a doctor, I can understand the challenge they faced. Given the fire hose of information medical students must learn in just four years, how does one ever gently take a sip?

Is waiting to go to medical school after earning some "life experience" the remedy to the lack of empathy, humanities, and high burnout? Several of the comments were from people who had a career before entered medical school and they seemed happy with their decision. I think this is generally a good idea, but it doesn't address whether or not medical education as it is should be changed. It simply gives med students time to steel themselves before plunging in.

I don't know the answer to these questions. In an ideal world, we would all be Renaissance men and women. Our journals will contain anatomic diagrams alongside sketches of landscapes, the Madonna, and fantastic flying machines. We'll spend our days in the chemistry lab and write music by night. We'll all be well-read, empathetic, intuitive, doctors.

But in reality, our time is finite. We have to make choices, prioritize, and prepare for standardized exams. And I have physiology lectures to watch. Oh, and I could be totally wrong about everything because I haven't actually gone to med school.

That's all for tonight. The next post about this matter is going to get a lot more personal. I reflect on how I have taken to trying to be a well-rounded (future) physician.

Lists, Nobel Prize, Science Funding, Depression

Before: Regular jellyfish.

I'll start with the Nobel prize. In an article article aptly titled "Depression and then Nobel Prize", Tara Parker-Hope elaborates on depression as the major factor for Douglas C. Prasher leaving biomedical research. (Kenneth Chang wrote the original article published in the Times.) In addition to individual cause of Prasher leaving biomed research, there are larger structural issues too, mainly inadequate science research funding.

Prasher's relationship to this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry is that he was the first scientist to isolate the fluorescent protein gene from jellyfish. The Nobel was awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien for the technique of inserting this gene into other organisms to use as a marker. Prasher gave the gene to Chalfie when they were both working at Woods Hole and Prasher then left Woods Hole.

But reading the blog post and Chang's original article, it struck me that this attribution ignores larger structural problems with science research: lack of funding. Prasher's story through this lens would read something like this:

• Applied for 5-year NIH grant to study fluorescent protein gene. Application denied.
• Applied for 2-year American Cancer Society grant to study the same. Grant received. But it was less money than the NIH grant.
• Quit job at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
• Gets job at USDA. Quits job. Beginning of depression.
• Gets job as NASA subcontractor. Position eliminated due to lack of funding.
• Depression returns.
• Gets job driving van for Toyota dealer.
  

I don't know what caused what: if depression lead to loss of interest in job or lack of research funding lead to depression. I don't know if maybe Prasher just wasn't a very good scientist and the other NIH grant applicants really were better than he was.

But depression seems to me only a part of the problem. I don't think this is sufficient evidence to make this an example of the American individualist psyche that blames failure (and glory) on individuals, but I'm tempted to make the generalization. I'm also tempted to turn this into a policy pitch for increased federal funding for science research. The bad news is that NIH funding has remained flat since about 2003 and flat funding is in essence decreased funding because of inflation.

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I try to keep a short list of things I want to write about soon but I usually never get to write about most of these things because my (un)productivity is about one entry a week. I hope that now that I write these out, I'll feel like I have an obligation to write them.

This week I want to write about:

• Nicholas Kristof's NYT column about the global effect of a potential Obama presidency.
• Pauline Chen's post on the Well blog about literary medicine and its role in medical education.
  
• The Man Who Set Stage of a Nobel Now Lives a Life Outside Science
  

I read publications outside the NYTimes, I swear.

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After:












Mouse neurons. source
An image drawn with fluorescent bacteria colonies on an agar plate. source

NYT Op-Ed Art, Music, Literature, and Science

I'm working on another update but I saw this New York Times Op-Ed "Put a Little Science in Your Life" and thought I would say a few quick things about it. Brian Greene is the author of this piece and of the books "The Elegant Universe" and "The Fabric of the Cosmos." He sums up the problem with science pedagogy as follows, "We continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details." I like his explanation of " the vertical nature of science", that students must learn the foundations of scientific theories before they can move on to the exciting new breakthroughs. I agree that this is part of the reason that many students find science so boring.

In contrast, the humanities is not bound by such linearity. We now don't teach little kids English literature chronologically, starting with Homer, then Vergil, and so forth until the poem gives way to the novel and to modern authors. But The Odyssey and the Aeneid are introduced once students have a grasp of reading.

It's an apt comparison, the necessity and beauty of art and science. As a musician, I know what Greene meant when he said that this way of teaching science is like making a music student practice scales without performing the great masterpieces.

Earlier this evening I took a walk by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, very close to where I live. Inscribed on the marble facade of the hall was a quote from John F. Kennedy in which he linked the greatness of a nation to the fluorishing of art:
"The is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo Da Vinci, the age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare."

After reading this op-ed, I re-read the quote and realized that Da Vinci was also a scientist and so achievement in science too should be connected to achievement in art and state. The Smithsonian Institute was reluctant to accept Charles Freer's art collection because the institute initially wanted to focus on scientific knowledge. But the in end Freer's bequest became the Smithsonian's first art collection.

Greene writes, "Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension."